Stars and Stripes: Military lawyers lose the ‘good soldier’ defense
Protect Our Defenders President Col. Don Christensen is featured in this article from Stars and Stripes:
“It allowed people to put their thumb on the scale,” said Don Christensen, formerly the Air Force’s top prosecutor and now president of the victim-advocacy group Protect Our Defenders. That was particularly true when commanders or high-ranking officers vouched for a defendant’s character, Christensen said.
“It can have a potentially huge impact,” he said, “even though it’s factually meaningless. It’s like a priest accused of sexual misconduct, or a teacher. How many times have they been teacher of the year? People who commit sexual offenses are often model citizens.”
But members of a military jury are likely to give deference to the testimony or statement of a three-star general or a defendant’s commander, he said. “They’re going to assume that the three-star knows more about the case than they do. They think, ‘He’s looked at the evidence; he wouldn’t be saying that if the defendant were guilty.”’
